Entrepreneur, father, and interactive software developer.

Monthly Archives: December 2011

I am joining Sencha to build a world-class developer program but in a larger sense I am returning to the intersection of Applications and The Open Web. I wanted to share my thoughts on why I am returning to web technologies and highlight some industry trends that are rapidly driving change within the software industry.

I believe that we are witnessing a sea-change in the platforms upon which software is built and delivered. Long term, I believe all software will be built with web technologies across enterprise and consumer facing applications.

Here are a few trends driving this change:

1. Web Innovation – Browsers and the core fabric of web technologies are innovating rapidly again. CSS, JS, HTML are changing to enable running first class applications in the browser with no dependencies.

2. Web Performance – The performance of web technologies has eclipsed end user performance requirements. JavaScript performance has improved dramatically in the past 3 years and browser rendering performance is in most browsers now leveraging the GPU for rendering. Fast code and fast graphics are essential elements to building great end user experiences.

5. Native Capacity – Few companies have the team capacity to deliver native applications across multiple platforms successfully. I am seeing many developers leverage web technologies within native applications to simplify development and reuse existing content, servers, and services.

Now while the trends and market opportunity seems crystal clear, the reality is there are actually very few companies actively delivering “professional grade” web technology solutions that “just work”. Sencha stood out for me for a few reasons:

Today I resigned from B&N NOOK Apps to embark on a new journey in my career. Before I talk about the next destination, I wanted to talk openly about my time at NOOK Apps and say thanks to those who made it great.

NOOK Apps was an amazing journey and will always be a highlight of my career. The opportunity to build a marketplace for applications atop a new class of content centric device was big, complex, and a ton of fun. I joined a small team and we built out all the required elements to succeed from scratch in 5 months. We launched NOOK Apps with 136 apps within an operating system update to NOOK Color. We went from 0 to millions of app installs per month and worked non-stop to make the platform better for all developers building applications. Over the past year we have helped thousands of app developers monetize great content on a new platform in a new market.

The best part of working on NOOK Apps was the team. I have worked with great teams before but never quite as good as the team on NOOK Apps. Every role was filled with a person with vast experience in the mobile space and together we made NOOK Apps a success.